Trevor Pott is a full-time nerd from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He splits his time between systems administration, technology writing, and consulting. As a consultant he helps Silicon Valley start-ups better understand systems administrators and how to sell to them.

In the world of data protection you don't get fired for losing money, you get fired for losing data.
Companies tend to make many copies of data, some of which hang around, zombie-like, for years. Data protection is without question critically important and we need to understand how it has evolved if we are to decide which …

Sysadmin blog
How objective are you? Can you design IT solutions outside your own experience? Are you capable of testing unfamiliar and uncomfortable software, services and solutions with an open mind or do you immediately lash out against the mere idea of change?
How far outside of your direct experience can you really step and at what point …

Sysadmin blog
Everyone and their dog has an opinion on the Superfish debacle which has struck once mighty Lolnovo Lenovo a potentially critical public relations blow. The Register's own Ian Thomson had little nice to say on the subject, and both social media and anecdotal experience indicate to me that his feelings are reasonably widespread. …

Sysadmin blog
VMware has officially launched vSphere 6.0, and I can say without reservation that it is a truly excellent release. I have spent much of the past year expressing skepticism about VMware; face-first exposure to the darker, more political aspects of the organisation had caused me to lose faith in the company. So good is vSphere 6 …

Sysadmin Blog
Let the internet run amok for long enough and you'll eventually find someone making millions with exploding kittens. Curious? Well look no further, because the internet has delivered!
As of the time of publication, Exploding Kittens: The Card Game has achieved $3,207,001 of its $10,000 goal with 27 days left to go. Exploding …

Sysadmin blog
Things are looking up for hyperconverged vendor SimpliVity, which reported record growth in 2014 on the back of a number of strategic wins and a key partnership with Cisco.
Simplivity is claiming a nearly 500 per cent increase in sales compared to 2013 and has now passed 400 employees worldwide, all of which makes me wonder what …

Sysadmin blog
It's that time of year again. You have to go forth and buy things for your gaggle of nerdly minions, but you've no idea what they want. In the rare instances they emerge from their caves they mostly spend the time alternating between heartfelt invocations about "the burning painball in the sky" and a lack of caffeine. Social …

Keeping servers cool is a challenge, even in a purpose-built data centre. Imagine for a moment the difficulty of doing so as part of an oil pipeline in the Australian outback, or as part of a military command post in the deserts of Afghanistan.
I can tell you from experience that cooling is a serious issue even during a Canadian …

The value of enterprise management associated with modern blades has been made apparent to me. At the same time, I understand the value that "unblade" systems, such as the Supermicro Twin series or Open Compute systems, can bring.
Cost, and what you plan to do with the things, are, as always, the determinant, but there are no …

Any follower of today's technology magazines will have heard a lot about Open Compute Project (OCP) servers. These are servers stripped down the bare minimum, crammed into a single chassis and managed centrally through software that provides high automation and data centre-scale orchestration.
In an OCP world, cost reduction is …

It's clear that Docker is here to stay, but we must temper our enthusiasm with pragmatism and a careful analysis of history. There are many pieces on the chessboard to consider, and each of them has a mind of its own.
Docker is simultaneously a big fish (thanks to the hype around it) and a relative minnow compared to the tech …

Nowadays we take blade servers for granted, but a lot of moving parts had to come together for us to get where we are today. Tracing their history can help us make better judgments about how the technologies of tomorrow will evolve.
The development of VMEbus architecture in about 1981 was perhaps the beginning of technological …

Sysadmin blog
Though there are still a great many players on the field fighting savagely for the right to dominate the industry for the next decade, I believe the storage infrastructure wars are already largely over. With so many startups still entering the storage space, and so much money flowing around it seems like I'd be mad to do so, but …

When it comes to storage, what benchmarks to use, how to configure them and how to interpret the results has been the subject of many a heated debate.
Benchmarks are supposed to provide empirical data that can be used as evidence for drawing rational conclusions. Of course, if you torture data long enough it will confess to …

Comment
If you're willing to start from scratch, give up high availability, the ability to run multiple operating systems on a single server and all the other tradeoffs then Docker really can't be beaten. You are going to cram more workloads into a given piece of hardware with Docker than with a hypervisor, full stop.
From the …

Sysadmin Blog
Docker is slowly taking over the world. From its humble origins, which we explored on Friday, as an internal project at dotCloud, through to Microsoft's recent announcement that it will support Docker natively in Windows, Docker looks set to become a major component of modern IT infrastructure.
Today, Docker is powered by …

Sysadmin blog
Is consumer networking gear really crap? As technologists, we tend to have a chip on our shoulder about it because it can't do all the things the latest, greatest enterprise stuff can do, but does that really matter? The capabilities of consumer gear have been steadily increasing, and perhaps some of our ire is unwarranted. …

Sysadmin Blog
Docker, meet hype. Hype, meet Docker. Now: Let's have a sit down here and see if we can work through your neuroses.
For those of you who don't yet know about Docker, it is a much-hyped Silicon Valley startup productising (what a horrible unword) Linux containers into something that's sort of easy to use.
Containers aren't a new …

Active Directory is dead: long live Active Directory. While Microsoft's Windows Server Active Directory (WSAD) is unable to meet the needs of today, its younger sibling Azure Active Directory (AAD) looks set to take the world by storm.
I have given it the once over and am impressed with the technology – but also ambivalent about …

In modern computing, disaster recovery can be thought of in the same way as insurance: nobody really wants to pay for it, the options are complicated and seemingly designed to swindle you, but it is irrational (and often illegal) to operate without it.
All the big IT players are getting into disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS …

Flash is the new storage medium of choice and this has led to an explosion of interconnect options.
Magnetic disks are slow and not particularly latency sensitive; interconnects designed for them just don't cut it in a world where flash drives can be 10 times faster and are highly latency sensitive.
Let's take a quick look at …

Perhaps the most perplexing question I have been posed this year is: "Why should I use SSDs?"
On the face of it, it is a reasonable question. When it was put to me, however, I just sat there staring at the wall, trying to form a coherent thought. Where to begin?
As it was late at night, I decided that starting with a brief …

Opinion/Interview
The Register does not endorse any particular viewpoint contained in this interview. We will update readers on the court's decisions as the case unfolds.
The Netlist/Diablo lawsuit is intriguing if for no other reason than the technical depth of the topic. Diablo's Memory Channel Storage is certainly an interesting product. The …

Sysadmin blog
Register storage supremo Chris Mellor has recently been reporting on EMC's slow descent into corporate depression due to a combination of activist investors and recalcitrant internecine political strife.
There's nothing surprising here, I've been hearing the same things all across the EMC federation, though I've no inclination …

Sysadmin blog
The Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) war is coming, and it will reshape the information technology landscape like nothing has since the invention of the PC itself.
It consists of sub-wars, each important in their own right, but the game is bigger than any of them.
We have just been through the worst of the storage wars. …

Sysadmin Blog
Controversy has erupted around Microsoft's Windows 10 preview. More specifically, questions are being raised about the amount of tracking – and the depth of tracking – that was built into the preview.
The Windows 10 technical preview goes so far as to monitor your typing, potentially crossing the line from instrumentation of …

Every pure solid-state disk (SSD) and hybrid storage vendor on earth would like you to know how brilliant it is at handling virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) workloads.
VDI may be a niche, but it is a miserably difficult niche, in which storage plays a huge role. There is a lot more to making VDI work well than just throwing …

Review
The Inateck BP2001 is a 2 x 5W Bluetooth enabled portable stereo speaker. It's reasonably stylish in design, easy to use, has a slot on top where your mobile device sits and charges via standard micro-USB. It's a reasonably good catch at £50, although the Inateck website will direct you to Amazon where you can buy it for under £ …

As solid state drives (SSDs) become a critical part of today's storage, it is becomes increasingly important to learn about the supercapacitors that help prevent data loss.
The presence – and type – of supercapacitors in SSDs should be as important a consideration as choosing between MLC, eMLC and SLC-based drives. …

Sysadmin blog
Anyone who says public cloud computing is "pay for what you use" is trying to rip you off. The public cloud is pay for what you provision, and that is a completely different thing.
In order to move away from the model that pretty much every existing application uses – one where you provision the peak amount of resources required …

Sysadmin blog
Cloud computing comes in many flavours, but the victor of the next few years will be the company that successfully sells its vision of the "hybrid cloud". If public cloud computing is putting your workloads in someone else's datacenter and private cloud computing is running them in your own, hybrid cloud computing is supposed to …

Like most of you reading this article, I neglect good patching hygiene.
There are very good reasons why we should all of us obsessively test every patch and patch our systems immediately, but patching is a pain in the ASCII.
The tools suck, rebooting sucks, and most damning of all, something usually breaks.
Each PC, and most …

512KDay
On Tuesday, 12 August, 2014, the internet hit an arbitrary limit of more than 512,000 routes. This 512K route limit is something we have known about for some time.
The fix for Cisco devices – and possibly others – is fairly straightforward. Internet service providers and businesses around the world chose not to address this …

Updated
Canadian ISP Shaw is experiencing a "nationwide outage affecting internet browsing", according to the polite phone robot put in place to discourage affected punters from overwhelming support systems.
The issue appears to be multi-faceted. Your Canadian vultures have personally encountered numerous "rolling" outages over the …

Sysadmin blog
Public cloud computing has finally started to make sense to me now. A recent conversation with a fellow sysadmin had me rocking back and forth in a corner muttering "that's illogical".
When I emerged from my nervous breakdown I realised that capitalising on the irrationality of the decision-making process within most companies …

Sysadmin blog
Smart-homes are not designed for the young, fit 20-something. Instead, smart-homes have been absorbed into the Internet of Things (IoT), a broader form of connectivity worship that seemingly aims to unify fridge and washing machine, automobile and heart monitor.
The purpose of all of this technology isn't readily apparent those …

Sysadmin blog
The recent Synology Synolocker issue should serve as a splash of cold water to any vendors in the tech industry that design and sell systems that are largely unattended or unmanaged.
As described in The Reg yesterday, Synology NAS boxes are being hit by a Cryptolocker-like piece of malware dubbed Synolocker. Like Cryptolocker, …

Synology Diskstations and Rackstations are being hit by malware dubbed Synolocker. The malware is a similar to the infamous Cryptolocker ransomware in that it encrypts all your files and then demands a ransom to unlock them.
The vulnerabilities that enable the malware appear to rely on hard-coded passwords to recommended …

Podcast
The Register presents the second installment of the Vulturization podcast series – listen here or from the player below.
This time, your inordinately caffeinated host sits down with Dwayne Lessner of Nutanix and veteran sysadmin Phoummala Schmitt to talk about converged infrastructure, marketing hype, and the ever-increasing …

Sysadmin blog
Security flaws are a great source of inter-company marketing FUD, but it is how a company responds to them that determines how trustworthy they are. Can you bet your business – or your personal data – on a company that simply brushes flaws under a rug? Where does the vendor's responsibility end and that of the customer begin?
As …

Sysadmin blog
Synology quietly released version 4.2-3250 of its DiskStation Manager (DSM) operating system this month. This squashes critical security bugs in version 4.2 of DSM – bugs that were fixed in version 5.0 in June, so consider this a back port.
Version 4.2 is old but still in use in various models, such as the DS109. The update got …

It is 25 July, and that means it's Systems Administrators Appreciation Day once more. Sysadmin Day is that one special day a year where syadmins the world over say to each other "Wow, I can't believe we all made it another year", and everyone else forgets that this has been a thing for 14 years.
Despite the inevitable apathy of …

Webinar
Join us for the second live webinar in our VDI in the real world series as we explore the complexities of user virtualization with our expert panel.
Building a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is much more than lashing together systems to handle the workload: user virtualization is of increasing importance, especially as VDI …

Sysadmin blog
The virtualisation community is all atwitter with speculation about VMware's MARVIN. MARVIN, for those who don't know, is supposedly VMware's hardware'n'software answer to hyper-converged competitors like Nutanix.
Everyone has an opinion, and everyone has a theory – but VMware itself is carefully keeping schtum. I have some …

Review
As Microsoft continues its corporate redefinition as a subscription-driven cloud slinger we should bear in mind that this path includes more than simply Office 365 or Azure.
Microsoft's Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) is slated to become an important new buzzword as it wraps up Windows Intune, Azure Active Directory Premium ( …

Sysadmin blog
The implosion of source-code hosting biz Code Spaces should have rung plenty of alarm bells.
A company with a loyal following and a bright-looking future suddenly disappeared, never to be seen again. What's worse, for the past several years a significant chunk of the IT community has been warning about exactly the sorts of …

3CX has released its newest WebMeeting videoconferencing solution. As I still had the virtual machines from my testing of its software PBX rattling around my lab, trying this latest offering seemed like a good plan.
After some fits and starts it tested out well, better than I had expect from a 1.0 product.
Unified …

Sysadmin blog
Puppet Labs is rolling out what it calls the Puppet Supported Program, which pushes gear that's been tested and certified to work with its automation software Puppet.
Swift uptake by many big-name vendors in the program comes on the heels of a $40m funding announcement. If you had any remaining doubts that DevOps is a thing, and …

Sysadmin blog
With the Dell-Nutanix tie-up now public knowledge, expect a stream of digital vitriol to follow.
There's a lot of bad blood between the VMware faithful and Nutanix, not the least of which is due to Nutanix's completely rational decision to support multiple hypervisors – from Microsoft's Hyper-V to VMware's ESX tech.
The …

Sysadmin blog
So mega-corp Dell and converged storage software startup Nutanix are now buddies.
If you spend any time reading the internet's virtualisation bloggers, you can expect everything from a hearty "attaboy, Nutanix" to the casting of vehement aspersions and prognostications of various flavours of doom. It's an important moment for …